Visual Review

Karaoke.

Opening. Just as lazy as Hiryuu’s but worse since their lines always interfere with each other.

Rating: Bad.

Ending. This karaoke tastes like aborted fetus soup.

Rating: Terrible.

Typesetting.

Beautiful.

Ahahahahahahahahahaha

Oh god it’s terrible.

I think I’m going to die of laughter.

Other.

Just to be clear, we’re blaming everyone but the encoder again, right?

Script Review

Main Script.

There are a lot more words and phrases that come to mind than “Careful” when you see a girl about to be hit by a fucking tank. Among them, “Heads up.” “Perchance you may wish to vacate yourself from the premises in hasty manner.” or the ever-useful “Run!”

I’m sure you can come up with some on your own that are better than “Careful”. It’s not very difficult.

And we start off with mumbly fucking phrasing. Try

“She was having issues earlier too.”

Don’t dance around the issue; you’re not a goddamn ballerina.

Boom! There we go.

There were some other clever expressions in this release, but I didn’t wanna bother screenshotting all of ’em.

is

Honest question, Commie. Do any of your editors know what italics are?

Anybody wanna guess what Japanese word led to “Somehow”? I swear, every time I hear this kind of “translation”, it pisses me off. “this” isn’t even the right word here; you’d use “that”.

Advice: Pretend “nanka” does not exist. Don’t fucking try and translate it because you can never do it right.

“That felt better than hearing a confession!”

Somehow that line looks shit. Somehow I think any number of other translations would work. Somehow I feel that this would work better:

“That felt better than getting asked out!” <- It leads into the next section just as well and actually resonates with western audiences since we don’t call it a “love confession”.

Your TL over 30 or something?

“And I can text real fast too!”

Crunchyroll: Tankery

Hiryuu: Tankwondo

Commie: Panzerfahren. Really.

If there’s anything that differentiates between the quality of the three releases, it’s this simple translation.

I originally took this screenshot because I thought “Wagon Sale” was typesetting (it’s not). But now that I have it here, might as well just mention I thought this was a missed opportunity to use “exterior decorating” in a sentence. :X

“So no exterior decorating?”

I’m just moping; score won’t change from this.

Why not, “Take firing positions!” ? Oh, because that would be English and Commie’s trying out German style subs. Forgot.

They overlap when the bottom line isn’t being said anymore. Noticeable timing error because the “Now, I know this is sudden,” line awkwardly hangs in the air for quite a bit afterward.

What, they’re related? I thought they were just childhood friends. Whatever, I’m gonna assume “Grandma” is just a nickname for someone the both of them know. Not good to assume TL errors and end up with egg on my face.

However, this does need to be “as angry as”.

No! In this line you’re getting all confused between plural and singular and it results in a mess.

If you’re going to refer to “Saint Gloriana Girls’ Academy” in the singular, it should be “Saint Gloriana Girls’ Academy, our opponent, uses defense, coordination, and teamwork.”

If you’re going to use the plural, go with “Saint Gloriana Girls’ Academy, our opponents, use defense, coordination, and teamwork.”

Results

Watchability: Watchable.

Visual grade: C-

Script grade: C-

Overall grade: C-

I don’t see any reason to choose this release over Hiryuu’s unless you’re really keen on the idea of seeing the German in their German sub track. But I don’t see how that gimmick could entertain anyone for more than an episode.

That final rating was actually pretty random, because I can’t really rate a sub with just a few German lines/words. Obviously this whole review was not to be taken too seriously (like fnord did, see his comment on our site), although the mistakes I pointed out were actual mistakes and the visual ratings were also given according to my taste and knowledge.

You mentioned it’s better than most German fansubs. Is the German scene pretty bad? I know Spanish subs are for the most part terrible, but I’m not really familiar with the quality of fansubs other than English ones.

Well, first of all there are more active German groups than English groups – obviously because we don’t have any simulcast services here and not many titles get licensed (from this season only Magi so far), so nearly every current show can be subbed without getting fucked by the publishers*.

Needless to say, as we have so many groups here, there are a lot of shitty groups – mostly 14-year-olds (who open up new groups instead of joining experienced ones and learning how to fansub first) taking English scripts and speed-translating them – without any knowledge of the Japanese language… or the English language… and sadly also of the German language. As everybody knows, German is a difficult language, so if you’re not talented, you ultimately fuck up the translation. And for talent you eventually need experience – something 14-year-old kids simply don’t have. Fortunately those groups die really fast – but the vast amount of them popping up every season out of thin air confuses everyone who is interested in watching German fansubs – and so they draw the conclusion, that all German fansubs are bad.

Which isn’t the case. We have many experienced and talented groups, some of them established 6-8 years ago and still doing this shit (yes, we have many active groups that are much older than most of the English fansubbing groups, some of them grew out of former English groups, like NanaOne out of Shinsen for example). They have people who are experienced enough with the Japanese language to let their own style influence the script instead of just translating the English scripts word by word – most of them still use the English scripts as a reference, but there are also German translators who are translating from scratch (or from Japanese closed captions).

Back to your initial question: The German fansub scene is not worse than the English scene. We have some good groups, many mediocre groups, some shitty groups and 1-2 dyslexic Hadenas every season. Just like the English scene. My “better than your average German fansub” phrase in the article was just a reference to those people who consider the German fansub scene as a huge pile of shit.

*Semi-off-topic for everyone, who is interested: Yes, our publishers do shut down servers of fansub groups who are subbing the few licensed anime – but our market is much smaller than the American market, so subbing licensed anime does actually hurt the publisher. And it’s stupid as there are so many unlicensed series. The whole publisher-fansubber-relationship in Germany is very different from that in North America. Most of our publishers tolerate fansubs and like the idea – some of them also cooperate with fansubbers by informing them of new licenses. Kazé Germany (Viz Media) is currently producing a subbed streaming version of Bakuman completely done by experienced fansubbers (from various groups) – Kazé only does the final QCs, everything else is done by the fansub team (I’m in charge of project coordination, QC and encoding – and I love their decision of putting an experienced fansub encoder in charge of the encoding, because that results in much more appropriate video quality than that shit Crunchyroll is selling… and of course it’s a great experience for me to work with the actual source material instead of HDTV transportstreams).

nano from the German group Himitsu did a lot of research on fansub history (international and German history) for her bachelor thesis in Japanology. I was proof-reading it and it was very interesting. We will probably put the history part of her bachelor thesis on our blog soon, so if some people are interested, I may translate it into English (if she’s okay with that).

Heh. I was actually writing an article about Girls und Panzer titled “Mein Kampf: One man’s struggle to find something enjoyable in Girls und Panzer”. But I ended up scrapping it because it’s hard to turn “this show is the most shallow, stupid pandering I’ve ever seen, with no speck of originality or entertainment to be found within it.” into a full post.

From reading posts from those who understand Japanese, comments generally run watch Horrible or Hiryuu as Commie has the most translation mistakes.

JMO, but Hiryuu has too much “slang” for me so I go with Horrible though it’s not an ideal solution. Plus, “tankwondo” = fail for me. Thank God for Aegisub. That being said, I’d still watch Hiryuu over Commie.

@DS – thanks for the review & to each his own regarding the show overall. I fall into the WoT/WWII “fan” category and like GuP a lot. It starts off slow, but by EP 03 the action picks up quite a bit. The show’s done remarkably well with accuracy in terms of tank details & related. It’s been big surprise hit this season with BD pre-sale orders at/near the top of the list.